


Monarch Butterfly

by OxfordOctopus



Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [27]
Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game), Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Gen, Post-GM, Post-Gold Morning (Parahumans), Post-Golden Morning (Parahumans)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:15:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23120836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: In which, after Gold Morning, Taylor ends up in Arcadia Bay.Predictably, things go to shit almost immediately.
Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [27]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1435474
Comments: 17
Kudos: 103





	1. Chapter 1

Arcadia Bay was a dying town. In small parts, admittedly, it wouldn’t be bled dry and fallow for quite some time yet; maybe another decade, maybe two, but it was dying, whether or not anyone wanted to admit it. It was a starkly familiar sort of death, too, it was the same sort of death Brockton had faced, piecemeal and gradual, a slow slide into the waters of the coast, drowning itself in upper-level corruption as what value could be found in sprawling hiking trails and a lighthouse was extracted and portioned out to those in a position of power. 

It wasn’t hard to see, either. Maybe Taylor was just a bit sensitive to that sort of thing - growing up around her father, and then doing what she did in Brockton, dealing with  _ Coil _ \- but she could see it in the infrastructure of the town, the parts of town left mostly abandoned, fire hazards carefully ignored by an ageing, gradually decreasing population. She could see it in the emphasis on tourism, the ‘nature hike’ packages offered by the five separate tourism agencies the town had, circling the small little clusters of wildlife like hungry vultures, all the while trying to look appealing, eco-friendly, decrying their competitors as opportunistic when they were no better.

She could see it in Blackwell Academy, in the way it transitioned from high school to a seniors-only school focused on the arts, focused on drawing in the right type of media-savvy people who’d regurgitate the carefully-curated bottom line.

It was hard to miss, after all, she went there. 

The folly of youth aside, there was something very bitterly ironic about ending up  _ back  _ in high school after saving the world, after thinking, maybe a bit naively, that her duty was done and she’d never really have to dwell on the downward slope that her past mostly consisted of. She’d tried to make amends at the end of it all, admittedly, joined the Wards, even if it had been a bit...  _ forced _ , on her end, and tried, at least partially, to make up for her own mistakes, for the things she did in a bid to feel some semblance of control over herself. She’d killed the closest thing to a god that was likely to exist, usurped people’s rights, their agency, played a direct part in the death of thousands, and all for what? To wake up two weeks later, sans powers, smuggled into nowhere Oregon with her father, a pile of legal documentation, and a scholarship to an expensive private art academy?

Healing, she knew, wasn’t that easy. It hadn’t been easy for Brian, for the way he hid away after Bonesaw. It hadn’t been easy for Lisa, scarred and terrified. It hadn’t been easy for  _ her _ , at least not after the locker. Even with that weight in her head gone, the passenger’s connection cut, she was  _ still _ healing, still hurting. Sure, her father was alive, and her future looked to be happily mundane, but they’d given her  _ two fucking months _ to get over all of that, to get over the nightmares, and to move on. To go to a school with a name that brought up memories of the woman partially responsible for her trigger, in a town named after a school she abandoned for a girl who betrayed her shortly after, a continent away from a city that didn’t even exist, not in this world anyway.

Dad didn’t get it, but then she didn’t blame him for that. She had been less than candid about what happened. 

“Miss Herbert,” Mr. Petre, the substitute that had replaced Mrs. Hoida after Nathan spent the better part of September harassing her into a mental breakdown, spoke up, breaking her free from the mental tangent she’d locked herself into. He hadn’t gotten her name correct once, and it still grated that he didn’t seem to care. “Please pay attention to the class.”

A few people behind her tittered, giggles muffled beneath the length of fingers or smothered in the back of their throat. Taylor ignored them, ignored the twinge in her missing arm, the thing they’d singled her out for. For all that she had faced down criminals with no compunctions towards murdering innocents, some of them her age, she had somehow managed to forget just how mean teenagers could be. 

Plastering a fake smile onto her face and making no real attempt to make it look genuine, Taylor swallowed back the urge to correct him. 

“Sorry, Mr. Petre,” she lied, voice steady, flat, just shy of a monotone. The older man, glasses perched dangerously on the tip of his nose, thick brows lax, a balding head in the style of an Irish monk, just shrugged, looking appeased enough, before turning back to the expanse of Japanese poetry they had been going over for the last week. 

English class had been a disappointment, in the end. In another mirror to her time in Brockton Bay, the most interesting classes weren’t the ones she’d loved, but rather world history and social studies. So much was different without Scion, without  _ parahumans _ . Japan was still a unified nation, Newfoundland wasn’t flooded, Russia was... admittedly not too different, but without Sleeper, they were making attempts on Ukraine of all places, and China didn’t have a monarchy, hadn’t since the revolution. 

Not to even mention the smaller things. She hadn’t thought a lack of tinker tech would change too much, in the end, because upkeep and black box technology didn’t translate into the commercial sector, but she hadn’t recognized most of the car styles on the road the first time she stepped out of her new house. It might not have been used, but the style of tinker tech, at least the most popular, was taken and used as inspiration by the tech industry, and there was none of that there. The cars were all subtly blockier, with rounded edges, but there were none of the more familiar sloped, rounded hoods and raised chassis she was used to. The only thing even vaguely familiar was the vans, and that was because Taylor was pretty sure you couldn’t expand on a rectangle with wheels very easily, even when copying from hyper futuristic tech made by someone with a brain parasite.

Shifting in her seat, Taylor tried to keep her gaze level with the text on the screen, ignoring the dull chatter behind her. Mr. Petre wasn’t a very good teacher, mostly because he didn’t teach anything with heat. Sure, he got annoyed at her - more frequently than anyone else, might she add - for not ‘paying attention’, but most of his lectures were dry information and he spoke like he wanted to be here about as much as she did, which was to say not much at all. He seemed genuinely  _ bored _ with what he was doing, which was surprising since, as far as she could tell from the few times he’d held her back in class, he did care a great deal about what he was teaching, it was just that whoever taught him public speaking had instilled in him a habit of not revealing any of that. 

Still, she pitied him only as far as his disregard for her name might allow. He had dug his own grave, he could lay it in because she’d stopped caring much about the eventual outcome of Blackwell Academy after she watched a rich teenager rip apart the mental stability of a teacher who wanted to help, wanted to make her students thrive. Blackwell had been tainted since then, not that it wasn’t already a bit painful to go to, and she was only really sticking around because she lived on-campus and it, frankly, would upset her dad if she didn’t at least get through a year.

After what felt like another ten minutes of painfully dry exposition from a dead-voiced man in his eighties, the bell rang. Rising to her seat with the other twenty-something students who were in the same stream as her, Taylor packed her supplies away with her arm, ignored Warren’s  _ third _ attempt to ‘help her’ - the last time she’d let him help her, he’d misplaced her homework and she still wasn’t entirely sure if that was intentional or not - and slung her bag over her shoulder, slipping around an irate-looking Brooke - who she had hit it off with initially, only for their mutual respect to wither as Warren paid any amount of attention to her - and praying, desperately, that Mr. Petre wouldn’t stop her from slipping out the door and getting the absolute fuck out of dodge.

Thankfully, he didn’t. 

The hallway was packed, or at least it was for the size of the hallway. It was still weird going to a school that housed maybe a quarter of what Winslow had, and maybe a fifth or a sixth of what Arcadia had. Blackwell was home to about three hundred-ish students, maybe a quarter of which were dormitory students, and of which a quarter of  _ that _ were students from other parts of the world. The majority of students were holdovers, those who got free admittance into the school because they were part of the student body who had gone during its time as a 4-year high school.

The only thing that stopped it from being abandoned was that the school itself was planned in such a way that students went mostly through the same three or four hallways between periods. The halls did clear out quickly, though, and by the time Taylor was steadying her pace, one foot in front of the other, making her way towards the main entrance, there were only a few stragglers. Glancing behind her, Taylor caught Brooke’s gaze for a moment, the girl glancing between her and the floor before finally settling on her phone, with Warren close to her side, looking abashed for some reason. She wasn’t sure what was going on there, but she could make an educated guess, and she was just glad she’d avoided getting caught up in it before her friendship with either of the two could be turned into a point of contention. 

Taylor turned her head back around just in time to be completely blindsided by a startled, freckled girl rushing out of the art class. The collision wasn’t pleasant, a tangle of too-thin limbs and elbows jamming into one another. Taylor toppled forward, the girl toppled backwards, and in the process, she managed to upend the majority of her bag onto the ground, the prosthetic arm she mostly refused to wear - it was more dead weight than she was willing to admit - slipping out of her bag and hitting the ground with a loud, sharp clatter, followed shortly after by her face cracking against the smooth stone tiles of the floor.

Groaning, Taylor picked herself up from the ground, reaching up to feel around her nose just to make sure the way she landed hadn’t broken it. When her nose came away dry, and it was just the aching bruise along her left cheekbone that seemed even passingly troublesome, she finally directed her gaze back down to the girl, the one who was still sitting on the ground like a deer caught in some headlights. They shared a look between the two of them, confusing warring over the other girl’s face, growing more panicked, more intense as each second slipped by without a response. 

Before Taylor could think about what she was doing, she hunkered down and reached out to touch her shoulder. It was, at that same moment, that the freckled girl’s eyes went wide with even more panic, her mouth opening to say something, her hand raising, a flicker of something visible just out of the corner of Taylor’s eye before the world  _ lurched _ . It was nearly impossible to describe the sensation, but if she could make a comparison, it was as though gravity briefly became intangible; an immense, heavy force just passing right through her, like she wasn’t there, but still leaving its mark. Her vision swam, twisting into a knot as people and places and noises flashed in reverse.

One second, she was touching the shoulder of a freckled girl, and the next, she was back in her seat in English class. 

The world stopped for a moment, quieted. It wasn’t because of that feeling, it had left her just as quickly as it had come, the pressure waning, her head pounding, an aching drum beat that was intimately familiar. Her range, lost to her before, erupted, exploded out across the world around her, her presence sinking into the bugs that infested the building, that sequestered themselves away in little corners. The feeling was alien for just a few moments, a breath of time, before it all faded into harsh familiarity, the painful, nerve-twisting glare of  _ knowing _ , a faint irritation, a weight, settling back into her psyche. Her head felt heavier, her stomach dropped, and she felt, for a moment, inescapably ill.

“Miss Hebert?” Mr. Petre called out, and this time, instead of how he had been before, his voice was... emotional, worried. He looked at her, everyone did, and she wondered what her expression was like. “Are you okay?”

Swallowing down the sick with actual effort, ignoring the urge to draw her insects in, to get eyes and ears on every room in the building - how had she grown so numb to this urge? To the need to know where everyone was, to keep tabs on people? How hadn’t she realized how much weight was lifted when it was gone? - Taylor looked at him with one of the first genuine expressions she had given him. “No,” she croaked out, her voice harsh, thick in the back of her own throat. “I think I may be sick, can I go to the bathroom?”

Mr. Petre just nodded, and Taylor didn’t even bother to pack her things this time. She was out of her seat and out the door before anyone could get a word in edgewise. This time, when the lockers blurred and her feet stomped in a harsh rhythm down the hall, trying to hold back the gorge, it wasn’t because of some  _ effect _ , it was because she was just shy of sprinting. Ignoring the angered squawk from the principal, Taylor shouldered into the bathroom, ignored the awful smell of antiseptic and urinal cakes, slammed through one of the stalls, dropped to her knees, and emptied everything she’d eaten that day into the welcoming embrace of the toilet bowl.

How long she sat knelt there, gagging, working the intensity out of her system, the slick feeling in her head, the thousands of little nodes that now fluttered around the building, manipulated by her power, a power  _ she now had again _ , Taylor didn’t know or particularly care, but at around the same time her stomach stopped trying to escape out through her mouth, the door was jerked open, someone stumbling in, their footsteps halting at her opened the stall. 

Taylor turned and met the eyes of the girl who, at this point, she was relatively sure was at fault for all of this. 

The girl in question swallowed thickly, taking a timid step back. Taylor forced whatever expression had morphed over her features back down into the pit of her stomach, unthinkingly channelling her response into her bugs, a pack of ants screaming out in sync, ripping at the grass in a sudden fury. 

“Why?” was the first word that slipped out, and Taylor hated how it sounded so much like a plea. “What did you do?”

The girl shuddered. “I don’t know! Okay?!” There were a lot of emotions caught up in her outburst, so this wasn’t a  _ new _ issue. “I don’t know, I  _ don’t _ know! Nothing works right anymore, and— _ and _ —”

For the second time in as many minutes, the bathroom door flung itself open. Taylor let out a garbled noise, hauling herself forcefully to her own feet, just to make sure she wouldn’t look _ that _ gross, jamming the heel of her palm down onto the plunger, the toilet flushing away its contents. Turning back around, Taylor was given a rather fascinating sight: the freckled girl backing away, hands in the air, looking guilty and upset, while a girl with a shock of bright blue hair looked at her with something between anger and a deep, deep rush of loneliness. 

“Max?” the blue-haired girl choked out, and Taylor could more than hear the anger in that voice. Unable to help herself, Taylor urged a small fraction of the swarm - mostly young flies, there wasn’t a whole lot of lethal insects during this time of the year, at least not in Oregon - towards her, keeping them high in the air. “ _ Max _ ?” 

Max - apparently - shuddered, her posture drawing in on itself, shoulders hunched, eyes glassy. “Chloe,” was what came out, half-mumbled.

Chloe - or at least, she hoped so - straightened up, tensing her jaw in a stance that Taylor was intimately familiar with. Her fists clenched, and for a few seconds, she was sure Chloe was about to slug the smaller girl across the face. 

Then, of course, because three was a crowd, a fourth person forced their way into the girl's bathroom. This one, by contrast, was a guy, Nathan Prescott, and Taylor was struck by the fact that she wasn’t all that surprised that he would force his way into the girl’s bathroom without asking permission to do so. His eyes flicked to everyone but her - she was, at that time, still slightly in the bathroom stall - and Chloe, still with her fists clenched, still looking for something to hurt, opened her mouth and looked like she was about to start yelling at Nathan.

In response to  _ that _ , before she could do so, the psychopathic piece of shit pulled a gun out of his pants. 

Max looked lost, Chloe’s eyes went wide and her hands went up. Nathan started prattling on about ‘looking for things when she shouldn’t be’ and Taylor, feeling that this was, frankly, enough, dropped three-hundred and seventy-six flies and about two-dozen hornets right down onto his head before he could do something stupid. Nathan dropped to the ground, screaming in terror, Max’s eyes shot to her, Nathan  _ shot the fucking gun _ , missing everyone but still deafening her because of the acoustics in a fucking girl’s bathroom, Max dropped to her knees, hands over her head with a scream, Chloe jerked back, opening her body up wide in hopes of apparently stopping anything from hurting Max. 

Taylor dragged the swarm off of Nathan’s face, directing them up into the roof and spreading them out thin enough that it was nearly impossible to tell they were there, just in time for Principal Wells to burst through the bathroom door, finding her half-hidden behind a stall door, Max and Chloe terrified and huddling near one-another and Nathan on the ground waving a handgun around, screaming about ‘fucking killing someone’.

“What the  _ hell _ is going on in here?!” he barked out, harsh and loud. Nathan stopped struggling, opening his eyes to find that, no, there  _ were _ no bugs on his face. He looked up, paled considerably when he caught sight of the principal, and then tried to point at them with his dominant hand, a hand that just so happened to hold a gun.

“Drop the gun, Prescott!” A  _ sixth _ guy, one of dad’s friends—David or something, forced his way into the bathroom, gun raised and pointed at Nathan. Principal Wells opened his mouth for a moment, like he was going to contradict that, but glanced back down at the downed kid and let out a sigh, slumping as someone had just drained the energy out of him. He stepped to the side, and with that David forced his way in, ripped the gun out of Nathan’s hand with his free one, clicked the safety on, and then brought out a pair of cuffs. 

“Does anyone want to tell me what happened?” Principal Wells finally asked, ignoring the slight struggle Nathan was putting out as David kept trying to slip the cuffs around his wrists. Max looked to her, then glanced up with her eyes ever-so-slightly, and Taylor, breathing in, tried not to dwell on just how familiar this entire situation felt. 

“I was, uhm, sick,” Taylor started, not needing to ‘help’ her voice stutter any. It came out in a jumble, mostly, and was only briefly interrupted when Chloe yelped, head snapping around to her, apparently unaware she had been there, to begin with. Ignoring the uncharitable impulse to get frustrated by that, Taylor turned her gaze back to Principal Wells. “Then Nathan jumped in, and pulled a gun? Said something about killing someone, and then tried to shoot, uhm, one of them.”

There was a beat of silence as Chloe’s eyes narrowed down on her. For a moment Taylor wondering if she was going to tattle, before the girl’s shoulders straightened, her head looking back around to Principal Wells, who was looking at the two of them with a questioning look. 

“Yeah,” Max said, her voice no longer so shaky, something... different, audible beneath it all, drawing everyone’s attention back to her. “Happened like she said.”


	2. Snapshots 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Little glimpses into the future of Taylor's time in Arcadia.

“Taylor, get the door!”

Tromping down the stairs, Taylor huffed. Just over the banister, she could just see her father struggling with the fold-out, king-sized futon. Why they had originally bought the thing was beyond her - it was both ugly and nowhere near comfortable enough unfolded to justify itself - but, turns out, prepping for the worst-case possible had been the right decision, considering the circumstances.

The doorbell rang for the second time in what felt like as many seconds, Taylor hustled over to the entryway, reaching out to grasp the knob first with her missing right arm, then her left. It still felt subtly _off_ handling things with her left hand, like she was pulling at things in the wrong direction, and her handwriting was still shit, but at least Blackwell had waived the issue and let her type things, however slowly, on the computer rather than the alternative.

Hauling the door open and wincing at the blast of wet, frigid air, Taylor’s eyes jumped to David first. He towered over everyone besides herself and her father - she was six foot solid herself, her father only a few inches taller - and then his wife, Joyce, who was shorter by no small margin. Then to Chloe.

Wait, _Chloe_?

Chloe’s face, dutifully cherubic until they met eyes, split into a broad, toothy grin. “Heya!” she chirped, sounding entirely too energetic for someone toting around a suitcase and looking completely soaked through by the rain. “Good to see ya, roomie!”

Taylor slammed the door in her face.

* * *

It had been a mutual decision between herself and her father to come home for the week or so of repairs it would take before Arcadia Bay’s power grid was fully functional again. Even if Blackwell itself had remained almost entirely undamaged by the hurricane - just a few broken windows from debris being thrown around - the rest of the area hadn’t been so lucky, and school was still cancelled for at least the next five days. There were still daily outages, none of them for very long, but she had figured she would be more comfortable in her own home waiting out those dead periods than she would be sitting in a mostly-empty dormitory with the handful of exchange students who hadn’t bothered to return home and, of all people, Victoria, who had obstinately refused to leave. Something about a photography project that ‘she wouldn’t let some creep tarnish’, apparently.

A lot of people had gone home, whether locally or abroad. Max, for example, had been sequestered back off to Seattle, though she did her best to keep in contact, even when Taylor hadn’t asked her to. Kate was in a similar boat, lighting up her phone three or four times a day with photos, little reminders, other small things that weirdly kept her buoyed, kept the urge to go out and try to fix things with her reclaimed powers - and hadn’t _that_ been a thrilling conversation with her father - distant and possible to ignore.

Chloe Price - currently in her room, struggling to blow up an air mattress after stubbornly refusing ‘the pussy way out’, that being a hand pump - was the only real deviation to what she expected to happen. Chloe had taken a lot of what Max had told her in stride, and had accepted the small bits of information about her own powers, about her scars and wounds, that she was willing to parcel out. Not, of course, that she didn’t immediately try to intimidate her to explain ‘what the fuck was going on with the bugs’, but apparently getting Nathan put away in prison for accessory to murder and by extension managing to out a teacher who was preying on his students landed her firmly in Chloe’s good book, so she’d leaned off the demands after Taylor had explained to her that there was a lot of trauma caught up in her questions.

Of course, none of this prevented Chloe from being an annoying little shithead, but it _was_ Chloe, for all that implied.

Chloe, letting out a whoop that quickly died into a rattling wheeze, brandished the now mostly-inflated air mattress above her head with one hand, only for half of the thing to adjust and for the limper portion of the mattress to swing down and smack her in the nose, Chloe flinching and in the process dropping the mattress on her own head. Scrambling out from beneath it a few short seconds later, her breath coming out hard and ragged as though she had just run a marathon, Chloe turned to glare at the mattress like it was personally responsible for embarrassing her.

“Motherfucker,” Chloe gasped, leaning over to smack the air mattress a few times like it would do any good. “Stupid fucking thing, why couldn’t I just, fuckin’, take the pump, but _noooo_.”

Flopping back onto the bare surface of the air mattress, Chloe went quiet for a moment, staring up at the ceiling. Taylor followed her gaze, traced along the ring of fairy lights she’d hung up, eyes tracing the barren patches of her wall, the places where the posters that were in her dorm room used to be. She’d left a few, mostly comic book ones, one Spider Gwen in particular wearing a rendition of her costume that was near-identical to the one she wore during the first year and a half of being Weaver, albeit with the traditional Spider-Man mask instead of her own.

“So,” Chloe started, stretching herself out just far enough to tap at Taylor’s bed with the tips of her toes. “You a comic book nerd?”

Taylor shrugged, not finding it in herself to feel all that sheepish or embarrassed. “It’s familiar to me,” she said after a moment, eyes glancing from the Spider Gwen poster to a few others, ones which were similar to old allies. A poorly-received, silver-age DC cyborg character that bore a striking resemblance to Defiant, one of the incarnations of Supergirl that looked a lot like Victoria Dallon, among others. “It was my childhood.”

Chloe hummed in the back of her throat, shifting with enough force to draw Taylor’s focus back to her. She was on her stomach now, half-laying on the ground, beginning the process of unzipping her suitcase. “I get that,” she said quietly. “I still have a thing for pirates, and they stopped being cool when I was like, prepubescent.”

Taylor didn’t bother to stop the snort that escaped her.

“Hey!” Chloe squawked in good humour, arm half-buried in her suitcase. “You can snort all you want, but god _fuckin’_ damn if it wasn’t my itty-bitty preteen lesbian heart projecting itself onto images of hot women in thin cloth shirts.”

Rolling her eyes, Taylor glanced back up at her ceiling, letting a comfortable silence fall over the two of them. Chloe was still rummaging around in her suitcase, muttering quietly beneath her breath, but there was no push to keep the conversation going, no need to fill the silence. The soft pitter-patter of rain, an on-and-off-again reminder of the hurricane that had washed through the city, tapped against her window, and the winds whistled by, but not with enough force to rattle anything.

It was quiet, silent, _calm_. For a second, Taylor let herself relax, felt her muscles unclench and felt her power more distantly, bugs no longer chittering in her ear, the urge to go out and _fix_ things, to be proactive, dying away.

“So,” Chloe drawled, luring Taylor’s eyes back to her. She was laying on her stomach, looking all the world like a cat with the canary. “Did you know a person was _murdered_ in this house?”

Taylor shut her eyes and dutifully counted to ten to stop herself from retaliating.

* * *

One of the things you don’t really realize before being an amputee is just how difficult some tasks become. Sure, Dad had gone the distance and outfitted most of the house with so-called ‘single-hand tools’, and sure her phone had an option to be more accessible for people with only one hand, but there was no real avoiding it, a lot of things were just _so much more difficult_.

Example number one was probably cooking. Truth be told, close to the end of her stay as a Ward, cooking had been something of an outlet that she cherished and _needed_ , a way to calm down. She’d rarely shared what she made - none of her teammates had ever been close enough to entirely trust it - and it wasn’t like she’d become a professional cook or anything, but she liked to think that she’d been, if nothing else, a _decent_ cook, and she was a decent hand at baking.

So, for cooking to become more of a _test_ than a way to relax had been... difficult to cope with. It wasn’t just the lack of an arm, either, for a while there’d also been the fact that whatever the bullets had done, it had rattled her brain, knocked some of her muscle memory out of place. It’d taken her days to learn how to walk again, for example, though things had settled back into normalcy shortly after. Not to mention that she’d lost a sixth sense without her powers, not that she’d been using her bugs to judge relative distances of where the pan was, but its absence had been felt and when you lived your life with a semi-permanent radar that helped you know where _everything_ was, the absence had been like going blind.

Even with it back, she still hadn’t fully regained that sense of awareness, not like before. Maybe it was the distance between herself and her passenger again, she was back to where she was before Leviathan, a range that wavered between a block and a block-and-a-half, and for all that she was once again aware of just how much her passenger weighed on her, encouraged certain behaviours, part of her knew that it was less than it had been before Leviathan, before Chicago and the string of Wards teams she’d been bounced around in for the better part of two years.

“Are you sure you don’t need any help?”

Taylor twitched, not finding the energy in herself to shunt the response to her bugs. Emotions be damned, she could hardly keep a straight face in front of people anymore, and for all that she’d thought she’d relearn how to lean on her bugs again, that was _clearly_ not the fucking case. After making sure she wasn’t grimacing, Taylor glanced back to the table, keeping her remaining hand firmly gripped around the handle of the pan. Joyce stared back at her, looking guilty and somewhat annoyed, her hands twitching where she held them, clasped over one another, on the table.

“No,” Taylor said, managing to even make it sound neutral instead of ‘frustrated-and-get-the-fuck-out-of-my-space’, a tone of voice she’d been brandishing at Chloe for the last two days of their prolonged sleepover. “I have it.”

Joyce smiled wanly, a knowing glint in her eyes. So maybe she hadn’t been as subtle.

Glancing back towards the pancakes, Taylor steadied her grip, jerked the pan forward, and flipped, managing to do so without missing. God, that had taken _so_ long to relearn for both her left arm _and_ the damn muscle memory issues. Weeks of getting shit everywhere and annoying her dad had been worth it, though, aside from bolting the pan to the filament there weren’t many ways to flip something with only one arm and without running the risk of accidentally shoving the pan onto the floor.

Breathing out shallowly, Taylor deflated. “Look,” she said into the half-empty din of six-thirty in the morning, a time she could no longer sleep through. For all that she might reflect back on the Wards with confidence, it had done some damage to her, made her inflexible, carved a schedule into her very body that she could no longer deviate too much from. “I’m sorry, okay? It’s just...”

“It’s your space,” Joyce said carefully, but not quietly. It was only the two of them awake right now. Dad was probably still in his room, Chloe was still snoring, half on the floor, half on the air mattress, and David had been out since six apparently, helping some of the reconstruction efforts and making sure shit didn’t collapse out from under people. Apparently, he was worse than she was, getting up closer to five, unable to sleep for longer than six hours at a time. “I understand people invading it can be frustrating.”

Taylor rolled her right shoulder, wincing at the phantom burst of pain, of an imaginary fire branding her stump. “It’s still not fair to you,” she found herself saying, which was true. She _was_ unfair to people who got into her space, who upset her schedules, who _changed_ things, she always had been, though getting powers had made it significantly worse. “I’m being stubborn.”

Joyce hummed, and something in her face relaxed. There was a moment of understanding that crawled over her expression, but unlike so many other people who had _understood_ her, from therapists to former teammates, it wasn’t accompanied by pity. Instead, what Joyce looked at her with was _acceptance_ , and that did kinda make all the difference. Maybe it was because she lived with David, a man Taylor did not like, but understood enough that he’d take to pity about as well as she would, or maybe it was because she lived with Chloe, a girl with her own laundry list of problems that she usually hid beneath an abrasive exterior, but for a moment, Joyce just _understood_.

Turning away, Taylor felt her ears heat up. It had been a while since someone had looked at her like that, had been more than just a casual observer extending judgement. Even Dad, for all that she loved him, _didn’t get it_. He couldn’t, they were too different, vastly so.

“Next time,” Joyce said, voice still careful, but with a spine of steel hidden away in it. “Would you mind if we worked together?”

Pushing back against the instinctive urge to lash out, to tell her _no_ , Taylor considered it. She tried to reach for that calm, pushing away her awareness of her bugs, reaching towards her center, towards the soft sizzle of pancake batter, and finally, _finally_ found it in herself to nod. “Okay.”

Reaching for her spatula, Taylor halted as a series of clumsy bangs and footfalls echoed out into the once blessedly quiet living room. Chloe, hair a mess of tangles and spikes in all directions, stumbled down the stairs with a bleary look in her eyes and a hand that kept patting at her pocket, as though she was expecting to find cigarettes that had been confiscated by Joyce days ago.

Yawning once and wiggling her fingers in a greeting to her mother, Chloe stumbled on over to the table, pulled a chair out, and then slumped back into it, head bowed backwards.

Taylor pulled her focus back to her food before it could burn, quickly scooping the somewhat singed pancake out of the pan, turned off the burner, and placed it onto her plate with the other two she’d cooked. Sure, they were a bit dark, and they weren’t the perfect circles that she’d mastered back on Earth Bet, but, well, at least she could reasonably make them now. The first few times she’d burnt pancakes had been almost heartbreaking, oddly enough.

“Y’look like a housewife,” Chloe mumbled, only to yelp in protest as Joyce cuffed her upside the head with no small amount of force. “What? She’s got an apron and everything!”

Picking up her plate, Taylor turned towards Chloe and waggled her stump a bit. “I’m still relearning how to do things, I don’t want to accidentally ruin my clothes.”

“Oh,” Chloe said, completely unrepentant. “Can you make me some?”

“Chloe!”

“What?”

Pushing back against older memories of similar situations, Taylor placed her plate down, reached up to the cupboards, retrieved one of the innumerable tea plates that her father had bought for reasons beyond her, and slid the most burnt out of her stack of pancakes onto it. “Sure.”

Shocked into apparent silence, Taylor wandered over to the table, placed her plate down, and picked up the fork she’d left on it, sticking it through the doughy surface and pulling away a chunk. Chloe, apparently not one to waste food, got up to retrieve the dark-brown pancake, and wandered over to the fridge, pulling it open. After a few seconds of nearly audible confusion, she turned back to Taylor, just as she was stuffing the first forkful into her mouth. “Where’s the syrup?”

Chewing, then swallowing, Taylor shrugged. “Dad and I aren’t fans of sweet stuff, so there isn’t any.”

Face dawning in what could really be either fake or _very real_ horror, Chloe stared at her in disbelief. “How do you _function?_ ”

“Chloe!”

* * *

“...additionally, the 2013-to-2014 sports season is cancelled for the remainder of the year, and will pick up instead during the 2014-to-2015 school year.” Mr. Wells’ statement was met with a chorus of protests and groans from the crowd, Taylor leaning away from one blonde guy in particular nearly standing up in abject anger. “Settle down,” the principal barked out with not a small amount of anger, a noticeable crack in his normally placid and calming exterior, but to his credit everyone did. “This is due to the damage sustained on the field and to a portion of our sports equipment, largely as a result of someone leaving the windows open in the gym. As a result of this, all further physical education classes will be cancelled for the winter period and will be done outside when the weather becomes hospitable enough.”

The first day back at Blackwell had been chaotic, to put a word to it. The dormitories were in flux, with some people permanently moving back home and others coming in to fill the gaps, and while the building hadn’t suffered any damage, the area outside was barren and muddy, and when coupled with hundreds of boxes going in and out, alongside moving vehicles, well, it would take a while for the landscaper to fix everything that had been torn up. A lot of students who had moved in were doing so because their homes were flooded, and a good portion of those students no longer had a lot of the needed essentials, and _Victoria_ of all people had started a student-staffed group to help portion out unneeded clothing and utilities for those who didn’t have them.

Maybe the weirdest thing about it was that, for all that Max had been skeptical, Victoria looked completely in her element. Personally, Taylor thought she’d make a great politician, but that wasn’t exactly a compliment.

Glancing back towards the window, Taylor watched as the sun, bloated and orange, continued to sink below the horizon. The school had remained closed for closer to a month, in the end, which had put everyone’s return to the school closer to the end of November. It was getting colder, even with the Pacific bordering Arcadia Bay, and apparently, winters here would be worse than they were in Brockton, not that it was a huge surprise. Brockton had been on the Atlantic, sure, but it had been warmer than it really ever should’ve been, probably due to being in a valley-like area that trapped heat. Arcadia, by contrast, was mostly flat, and sloped down towards the ocean, with a few rocky cliffs but nothing to buffer the incoming chill.

The shuffle of bodies pulled her back to the present, to her left Max and Kate rising from their seats. Mr. Wells had retreated from the podium, looking pale and pulled taut, but that itself wasn’t really a surprise. He was getting a lot of shit from people across the nation for enabling a near school shooting and everything that Jefferson did, though he had saved himself from being ousted by a hair. For all that America might like throwing money around and bribing, they sure did hate the idea of it.

Moving along with the crowd, Taylor tuned out Max’s babble as she went over her time in Seattle, the three of them weaving between bodies as they made their way from the auditorium back towards the dormitories. Pushing out through the front doors and into the chilly, evening air was a relief, the press of bodies rapidly peeling away as people made their way towards the parking lot and dorms in equal numbers. Cars and vans still sat in the muddy grass, some people even still moving boxes into them, but for the most part the chaotic press of movers was long passed, probably to the relief of Samuel, the janitor who was going to have to clean up all of the mess once people were done.

“Taylor?” Max was glancing back at her now, a curious frown on her face. She’d relaxed a lot ever since the storm had swept through, and though Taylor wasn’t about to ask, considering what she _did_ know about Max’s powers - and by extension, her passenger, but she was keeping that to herself unless Max tried asking about the source of the thing - she had a few guesses as to why a pretty intense hurricane had made her so relieved, probably because the alternative was worse. “You okay?”

Breathing out slowly, Taylor nodded. “Yeah, I think I will be.”


End file.
